Those stabilization grants ran out at the end of March. And now the North Carolina Senate and House of Representatives have proposed legislation that lawmakers say will reform the industry and make it more sustainable.
Lawmakers in each chamber say the proposals will flex staffing and capacity regulations to make it easier for child care providers to operate and expand. But the two bills have some differing ideas: The House version would allow more highly qualified teachers to oversee multiple classrooms and proposes a study on disconnecting quality ratings from how much centers are paid. The Senate bill lacks either of these provisions.
The Senate and House passed their respective bills in mid-April.
The Senate’s budget plan, passed April 16, included money to increase child care subsidy rates. The subsidies help eligible low-income families pay for child care so parents can work.
For some child care providers, “reality hasn’t set in yet” that the stabilization money is gone, said Kristi Snuggs, president of the nonprofit Early Years, which advocates for affordable high-quality early care and education. Not all providers knew the grants were ending — some thought the money would last until June. Others are still hopeful the legislature will pass another round of funding, she said.
It will take a couple payroll cycles for centers to feel the heat, Snuggs said. “I think we're going to see backlash as more time passes.”
‘Trying to figure a way out’
Other child care providers have been preparing for the stabilization grants to end, Snuggs said. That has meant solutions like raising rates, closing the more expensive infant and toddler classrooms or offering informal extra care such as on Friday evenings, she said.
Meanwhile, many parents are piecing together more affordable care — and in some cases unlicensed care — such as half-day programs, to make ends meet, she said.
Child care providers that were struggling financially have probably already closed, Snuggs said. With this extra funding ending, more centers will probably tighten operations and close classrooms.
Cassandra Brooks owns Little Believer’s Academy, which has locations in Garner and Clayton. She relied on the stabilization money for staff wages, she said, but overall, she said child care owners feel it’s almost not worth it to run the businesses anymore.
“Everybody's trying to figure a way out of this, figure a way out to do a different business,” she said.
It’s a difficult time to manage any business, she said, but especially child care. While the high regulatory standards are important, Brooks said it’s hard to hire teachers who meet the qualifications at the wages the owners are able to offer.
People from a variety of backgrounds should be included at state and federal levels to find a solution to the child care crisis, she said.
“Child care has been struggling. It didn't just start struggling today,” Brooks said. “Until somebody really looks at it and figures out the best way to truly solve this, we'll still keep spinning our wheels like a hamster.”
Meanwhile, as federal funding starts to tighten and state dollars could reduce as well, providers will have to make very hard decisions, said Iheoma Iruka, professor in the Department of Maternal Child Health at UNC Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Global Public Health.
De-incentivizing quality
Currently, licensed child care centers are rated from one to five stars using a point system based on program and education standards. Centers that get five stars receive more state and federal dollars than those rated four or three stars.
Child care subsidy funds help eligible families afford child care programs that have earned three or more stars, along with religiously sponsored programs that meet health and safety standards.
House Bill 412, which passed the House chamber on April 15, directs the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services to propose a plan to decouple the child care subsidy payments from the star rating system.
North Carolina House lawmakers floated the idea of separating quality from payment levels in the chamber’s proposed budget last year, as well, but the bill died in the Senate.
This year, the House’s proposed reforms originally included a directive to decouple the payments from the ratings, but bill sponsors backtracked after receiving pushback from the state health department, said Rep. Donny Lambeth (R-Winston Salem), one of the co-sponsors.
Many states don’t tie public dollars to ratings, in part over concerns that well-off centers would be continually rewarded while struggling centers get less resources, Iruka said.
But that’s not necessarily the situation in North Carolina, where most licensed providers have been part of the rating system for a long time and are invested in meeting those standards, she said. Changing that could “uproot the system.”
North Carolina has been an innovator in making sure kids can access high-quality early education, Iruka said. Decoupling payments from ratings would remove the incentive for quality and could lead to lower-quality programs, she argued.
Brooks’ center is rated five stars. She said the rating system works well when there’s an adequate supply of qualified teachers and centers are able to pay them accordingly. Right now, though, the money to do that is hard to find.
Snuggs said the change would fail to solve the issue of not being able to offer competitive wages for teachers — the point of incentivizing higher quality with higher rates is so centers can use that money to pay teachers, she said.
Andrew Weathersbee, owner of Providence Preparatory School in Charlotte, said many centers are four and five stars already, so flattening the pay scale could force some into offering only private pay options — leaving families who can’t afford those rates without care.
The study will hopefully leave room for negotiations, he said.
Addressing the workforce
House Bill 412 and Senate Bill 528 would both make five years of experience working in a licensed child care facility equivalent to earning a North Carolina Early Childhood Credential, or a college credit course.
Weathersbee agreed that experience should be sufficient to match the credential. He supports his teachers to get formal education, but he said the high demand for teachers calls for practical measures.
Not everyone has the ability to go through formal education systems, Iruka said, but it’s important to make sure that a teacher’s experience has been with high-quality programs. If teachers can meet some sort of competency standard, the policy should be more flexible, she said.
Snuggs said she’s not against the measure, but if someone’s experience has only been working in low-quality programs, that’s not sufficient.
House Bill 412 would also allow a lead teacher, or one that’s more highly qualified, to oversee two classrooms instead of one. Currently, each classroom must have one lead teacher.
Rep. Dean Arp (R-Monroe) said providers would still have to meet state and federal standards. He argued this provision would help address the shortage of teachers.
Snuggs retorted that the change would be “very problematic” for teachers and children.
“You can't be in two places at one time. You can't oversee what you're not seeing,” she said.
The provision could add additional layers of stress on lead teachers who are already underpaid, Iruka said.
For many of these changes, it’s a matter of weighing competing interests, she said. Maintaining high educational standards makes it harder to hire teachers, for example, but both are important.
More kids in class
The House and Senate bills both increase the maximum group size for 0- to 12-month-olds from 10 to 15 children, and for 12- to 24-month-olds from 12 to 18 children. The staff ratio for both remains the same — one teacher for every five infants and one teacher for every six of the 1- to 2-year olds.
Weathersbee said since the ratios are unchanged, the regulation likely wouldn’t affect quality. Providers would need to hire another teacher if they increased their group size.
Still, it’s not something he could see his center doing. The size of his classrooms is one factor, and having 15 infants in a room would increase the stress level, he said. But for other providers, it could be a good option, he argued.
Brooks and Snuggs both expressed concern that the provision would add stress on teachers. Snuggs said the maximum capacity allowed isn’t always what you actually want in a room. Some providers in the past tried to lessen the burden on teachers by taking fewer kids than capacity, she said. Now, many are already stretched to the limit.
The bill would exacerbate that issue, she said. Group sizes are an indicator of quality, she said, and having too many kids in a small environment hurts health and safety.
Iruka added that more kids in the classroom could mean heightened exposure to disease and overstimulate some children.
This article first appeared on North Carolina Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.